About I, Me and Myself

One has read about ‘Ahm’ of Vedanta which means ‘I’ or ‘Self’. When applied to a person’s name, it means aligning oneself with the cosmos or ultimate reality. ‘I’ is, perhaps, the most used word in any language. We love to hear our name all the time. Often, love for self is so deeply ingrained in the psyche that one develops a highly exaggerated view of one’s own self.

A child is given a name almost as soon as she is born. Through constant recall the name gets rooted in her being. While the child reacts to the name cheerily, she gradually gets used to be addressed by the same phonetic rhythm which keeps getting reinforced in the formative years and results in creating a permanent impact on her cerebral and emotional being. A lot goes on later in life that forces the child to grow up with a self-fixated orientation. How does this transition happen? We may look for an empirical and a non-academic explanation.

Children are generally free from the ‘I’ syndrome but some elements might creep in early on in cases where pampering has not been tempered with disciplining. Thus, too much attention and fulfillment of every wish by doting parents might lead to an unhealthy sense of self-importance, and promote the ‘I’ cult. Schooling in an exclusive environment and continued patronage could crystallize these traits. Such children are likely to nurture a high degree of self-importance in their growing up years and carry it on to adolescence and adulthood.

The problem arises when a person takes this trait too seriously and looks upon others as lesser mortals. Such a person becomes self-centred and egotistical. He is attention-seeking and is always looking for an opportunity to upstage others. He is clearly not a team person. Such a person tends to be self-righteous and abrasive. He is sociable only to the extent that his voice commands attention, dominates, and gets preferential hearing.

Individualism is not a failing; it promotes healthy distinctiveness. It is a positive trait that provides sustenance for achieving personal excellence and in charting life on one’s own terms. But individualism should not become a ‘new form of idolatry’, and thus an end in itself. The danger is ‘egoism’ and the obsession with ‘I’. This negativity in growing up years gets hardened with time and retards the growth of a well-rounded personality.

No one likes to be in the company of a person who keeps harping about his laurels. His cognition gets corrugated by thick layers of false pride and self-importance. It leads to the making of a conceited character. Such people are not good listeners. Their attention span is short. Their restlessness to shift over to their own story being overpowering gets exposed during the course of a social conversation. It is a habit-forming attribute that can be fought back only by recognizing the shortcoming and working around it consciously.

We need to realize and acknowledge that the world is not devoid of talent and that the simplest of persons also has legends to share – many hugely interesting and worth recounting. Internalizing the experiences gotten from others provide good incremental learning progression, affording a healthy opportunity to absorb positive notes for building up a well-rounded personality. Personal enrichment comes from imbibing the best from others, rather than from blowing one’s own trumpet.